Art crime

A criminologist looks at the full range of crime involving works of art: forgery, fraud, theft, smuggling, and vandalism. Art Crime includes current findings, drawing on much material from the "boom years" of the art market in the 1980s and continuing up through the 1990s, and assimilating information from a variety of sources: art magazines, newspaper accounts, and the relatively small amount of scholarship on art crime by art historians and criminologists. In addition to considering the motives of thieves, the book looks at the way art theft is socially organized: the types of thefts that are committed, the ways thieves locate art to steal and how they gain access to it, their use of insiders and fronts, and the way they launder stolen art. The relationship between art theft and organized crime, especially drug traffickers, is investigated. Following explanations of art vandalism and vandal behavior, the book concludes with a consideration of policies to curb art crime. Art Crime is written in a highly entertaining way, packed with case studies of numerous crimes and stories of smuggling, grave-robbing and skullduggery, that will appeal to a general audience as well as professionals and academics in criminology, sociology, and art history.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.